Visitirs
• Team ASL "A Spanish Life"

We started to get people from other groups coming to
see us who had heard of what we were doing, and
were interested in having a look for them. Our role
started to change and we became more like guides to
Moldova. We would collect them from the airport
accommodate them and show them around the
various projects that we felt needed support whether
this be a family that needed regular help to an
orphanage that could not afford to heat the home in
the winter or clothe the children.
Of course there were some projects that we did not
get involved with, one being the building of new
churches. This seemed to be the in thing in Moldova.
Religion had gone underground for many years in
Russia and now the people were free to believe in
whom they liked, this opened the doors to all the God
bothers the West had to offer. They came in there
hundreds all trying to establish their own ideas before
anyone else. We had Mormons, Jehovah Witness, and
Born again, and Lay Preachers, you name them and
we got them. One group I met when I was asked to
come to a meeting they were having in Belti one
evening after a day of giving. I turned up to the meal
as asked, before they started a few of the twenty five
strong group of Americans felt the needed to stand up
as they wanted to share with the others some fantastic
religious revelation they had experienced that day.
The first person was a girl in her early twenties who
told how she was in the street and had seen a man
without legs, she had offered him 700 lei (About £35)
and asked if he would take God as his saviour.
He had done so in a flash. The whole group held
hands and shouted halleluiah praise be to God. I think
I must have lost the plot. You offer a beggar the
equivalent of fourteen months pension if he takes God
as his saviour, he does so, and you are happy because
you think you have another convert.
The next person got up he had been in a village where
he had stumbled upon a family living in the most
appalling conditions, they had no indoor water (no
one did in the villages) they had no indoor toilet (no
one did in the village) and the electric only worked
for a few hours per day. (Guess what) inside the
house lived an old man and his wife, they were
offered food if they took God into their hearts, (guess
what). Again the hand holding and thanks to God, I
am sorry but they were in my eyes, mad, they lived in
a dream world. Needless to say this group and others
like it did not get our support. Once we started to
work with a group we simply became their people on
the ground, we would spend the money they sent
where they wanted it spent, we would report back and
send photos and reports and accounts, and when they
came over we looked after them.
One such group was from Taunton a normal church
that had done some work in Romania asked to send a
representative over in the form of Pat Derrick. They
like others were starting to hear about Moldova and
wanted to help. I collected Pat on the bus and over the
three hour trip to home I fell in love with this sixty
year old grandmother who was on a low income, a
none believer and wanted to take on all the problems
of the world.
She had in fact arrived with her son Richard fresh out
of the army after twenty-two years service and
looking for another mission, but it was Pat that was
the driving force she would decide for her son and the
group back in England what they were going to do.
We were still living in our two-bed apartment at the
time so we all dossed down there for the four-day
visit. First on the agenda was to take them round for
the next day and a half on what had become our
normal tourist route. We always showed a cross
section of what Moldova had to offer never too bad
and never too nice the families who had lived without
water and electricity for the last two years. (Imagine
the toilet) then to the old woman who had been blind
since 1951. Then on to the girl without a face.